Thank you for putting so much time into a response to my comment, I really do appreciate it. The major reason I wanted to air my thoughts in the first place, however malformed they might be, was to subject them to critique from others. I will do my best to put similar effort into my response and address each of your points.
Preemptively after reading through your comment, the position that I will take is that I think you are referring to a real chauvinist phenomenon, however, I intended to express a qualitatively different position than what you are reading my comment as expressing. This is probably my fault for not being clear. I will attempt to elaborate to the best of my ability in my response.
Also to get this out of the way:
It's possible that you're not even from one of these four anglo settler colonies, a white from South Afrika or a western european, and I'm sorry if that's the case but your comment reminded me so much to a lot of what white/"western" "Marxist-Leninists" or even "Marxist-Leninist-Maoists" say, if that's the case I don't know if it's an influence on you because of the language and that we are surrounded by mostly English-speaking Marxists in platforms built in, by and (mostly) for English-speakers, specially settlers in OTI or what.
I am white Amerikan, and accept that my class/national position in the world has imparted upon me and continues to impart upon me very significant reactionary tendencies which I must struggle to overcome (and that is likely an understatement).
Also,
the war between those two countries (and I don't mention their name because the algo might decide my comment is not "fit" for reddit discourse)
Unrelated to your broader point but has this happened to you, or have you seen it happen? I believe Russia and Ukraine have been mentioned by name a lot on this subreddit in the past without comments being taken down by Reddit, no? In any case going forth I will call them by name in my comment for clarity for readers and take the risk of the algorithm finding it “unfit”.
Anyways, on to the meat of the discussion.
But I've been able to see something from all of these years as a "Marxist-Leninist", and later, until two years ago, as a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist when I was able to learn properly about the labor aristocracy, read Settlers, and learn more about the PCP and the MIM and MIM (P), and seeing the opinions of English-speaking "Marxists" online for so many years (since the whole pro-trump movement back in 2015 and all it carried with it). This observation had only left me confused ever since the war between those two countries (and I don't mention their name because the algo might decide my comment is not "fit" for reddit discourse) became a quite more violent conflict in 2022, but really, the whole "gate" (again, won't mention the word due to censorship) "scandal" in 2015-2016 and all of the anti-communist transgressions those officials incited and egged on during that certain fascist movement in that country between November 2013 to March/April 2014. Now I actually am able to pretty much put into words that all of this is the chauvinism of "western ""Marxists""" doing the talking.
I want to point out that you're pretty much doing something I can only describe as a pattern that I've seen among English-speaking (and probably western european though I haven't really lurked french, german, dutch, nordic and other northwestern european language forums) 'Marxists' over the internet. And this is something that I've noticed from these "Marxists" that have sometimes commented on these two subs (except for the frequenters and the mods of course), on other reddit subs and the other big platforms youtube, twitter and bluesky.
Here:
I’ll go through the quotes you picked and try to clarify their meaning.
possible comparison of Amerika to the Russian Empire
The Russian Empire, and Imperial Russia, which I used interchangeably in my comment, refer to the Tsarist autocratic state (and also the 1st Russian Republic under the Kerensky regime) which controlled Russia proper along with a number of colonized nations prior to the October Revolution and the civil war. Ancien Regime Russia, if you will.
I only picked Imperial Russia as a comparison point to apply the polemics of Lenin and Stalin on the national question. The intent of my comment, which I think did not go through, was threefold:
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To elaborate upon the difference between the national question of Lenin and Stalin and the national question in OTI, which is very great (like you say later on, Russians were not and are not white), and I contend that this is the result of settlerism and imperialist value transfer working together to produce a nation (white people) which contains no oppressed classes. This is so incredibly important of a difference that it completely throws out the possibly of simply taking the Soviet solution and replacing Great Russians with White people.
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To elaborate upon where there is similarity in spite of the difference. I believe that once we eliminate white people from the equation, the polemics of Lenin and Stalin become quite applicable to the national question in Amerika (and probably the other settler colonies). Really, my comment was largely directed at answering questions I had in my head about the relations amongst the oppressed nations in OTI. Some examples:
a. There is a particular tendency I have seen brought up here in the past that rejected the Chicane liberation movement on the grounds that Aztlan would be on indigenous territory.
b. There is a question of how to draw the borders of New Afrika given the fact that as of today, New Afrikans are concentrated not only in New Afrika’s historical national territory, but all throughout the territory Amerikan entity, including the territory of Aztlan. Does that mean California will be part of New Afrika? Certainly not. But it does mean that Lenin’s and Stalin’s polemics against “cultural-national autonomy” are particularly relevant.
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To ask and give my thoughts on an important question that I have been asking myself recently: what differentiates settlerism from labor aristocracy?
As the article points out, Amerika is, much like imperial Russia was, a prison house of nations.
I meant this in the sense elaborated above. Amerika contains a great number of oppressed nations, and so it follows that the question of relations among them is important. I think that Lenin’s and Stalin’s writings on the national question are useful in working through those contradictions, and so I brought up imperial Russia. As I elaborated above, I am not saying that Great Russians were equivalent to white people. On the contrary, Russia proper under the Tsar, as a result of its position in the world as a backwards, semi-feudal, second-rate imperialist country, had a large proletariat, semi-proletariat, and poor peasantry which made it possible for Great Russians, despite being an oppressor nation in relation to, say, Georgia or Kazakhstan, to express genuine proletarian internationalist solidarity. This dynamic does not exist in Amerika (or the white “First World” imperialist pole in general).
…the proper way to deal with contradictions between oppressor and oppressed nations…
See my statement immediately following: “however, this was dependent upon the fact that the oppressor nation(s) in question had large oppressed classes, namely, a large proletariat.” Hence, this does not apply to Amerika.
…in discussing the relations among the oppressed nations (and with allied and suppressed settlers undergoing proletarianization, to whatever extent they exist).
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you may be reading this as the chauvinist tendency to say “white people’s conditions are getting worse and therefore they will become the proletariat.” On the contrary, I was expressing the general line put forth on this subreddit and by MIM, as I understand it, that white Amerikans who survive the protracted revolutionary process will by and large have to be forcefully proletarianized at bayonet point, that is, they will have everything taken from them and have to work as proletarians for the end of global apartheid and the development (largely by redistribution) of the imperialized world. This may be in a labor camps or it may be simply working alongside oppressed people (although perhaps with a greater workload expected), it entirely depends on historical contingency.
A major question facing Russian (and European) social-democrats
This refers to the specific issue of “cultural-national autonomy,” which was conceived in (and also reactionary in) Austria. From Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question:
What then is the national programme of the Austrian Social-Democrats?
It is expressed in two words: cultural-national autonomy.
This means, firstly, that autonomy would be granted, let us say, not to Bohemia or Poland, which are inhabited mainly by Czechs and Poles, but to Czechs and Poles generally, irrespective of territory, no matter what part of Austria they inhabit.
That is why this autonomy is called national and not territorial.
It means, secondly, that the Czechs, Poles, Germans, and so on, scattered over the various parts of Austria, taken personally, as individuals, are to be organized into integral nations, and are as such to form part of the Austrian state. In this way Austria would represent not a union of autonomous regions, but a union of autonomous nationalities, constituted irrespective of territory.
It means, thirdly, that the national institutions which are to be created for this purpose for the Poles, Czechs, and so forth, are to have jurisdiction only over "cultural," not "political" questions. Specifically political questions would be reserved for the Austrian parliament (the Reichsrat).
That is why this autonomy is also called cultural, cultural-national autonomy.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm#s4
Stalin’s polemic on why this is wrong is useful to us in analyzing contradictions between oppressed nations in Amerika.
Back to your quotes:
…“cultural-national autonomy,”…This slogan worked to maintain and extend national divisions within the proletariat and drive the proletariats of the various nationalities closer to their respective bourgeoises.
This is directly from Stalin in On the National Question:
But this does not exhaust the harm caused by national autonomy. It prepares the ground not only for the segregation of nations, but also for breaking up the united labour movement. The idea of national autonomy creates the psychological conditions for the division of the united workers' party into separate parties built on national lines. The breakup of the party is followed by the breakup of the trade unions, and complete segregation is the result. In this way the united class movement is broken up into separate national rivulets.
Austria, the home of "national autonomy," provides the most deplorable examples of this. As early as 1897 (the Wimberg Party Congress [19]) the once united Austrian Social-Democratic Party began to break up into separate parties. The breakup became still more marked after the Brünn Party Congress (1899), which adopted national autonomy. Matters have finally come to such a pass that in place of a united international party there are now six national parties, of which the Czech Social-Democratic Party will not even have anything to do with the German Social-Democratic Party.
But with the parties are associated the trade unions. In Austria, both in the parties and in the trade unions, the main brunt of the work is borne by the same Social-Democratic workers. There was therefore reason to fear that separatism in the party would lead to separatism in the trade unions and that the trade unions would also break up. That, in fact, is what happened: the trade unions have also divided according to nationality. Now things frequently go so far that the Czech workers will even break a strike of German workers, or will unite at municipal elections with the Czech bourgeois against the German workers.
The revisionist policy of cultural-national autonomy allowed for the proliferation of antagonism between the Czech proletariat and the German “proletariat” (I put it in scare quotes because there is an argument to be made that the German “proletariat” had significant labor-aristocratic elements at this time — which, it follows, was probably responsible for the victory of this revisionist slogan in the first place).
I would also recommend Thesis 7 in Lenin’s Theses on the National Question on this point. It is long so I will just paste the link. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/jun/30.htm
fight national chauvinism of all sorts
Again from Stalin’s On the National Question (italics in original):
It is proposed to bind the dispersed minorities into a single national union. But what the minorities want is not an artificial union, but real rights in the localities they inhabit. What can such a union give them without complete democratization? On the other hand, what need is there for a national union when there is complete democratization?
What is it that particularly agitates a national minority?
A minority is discontented not because there is no national union but because it does not enjoy the right to use its native language. Permit it to use its native language and the discontent will pass of itself.
A minority is discontented not because there is no artificial union but because it does not possess its own schools. Give it its own schools and all grounds for discontent will disappear.
A minority is discontented not because there is no national union, but because it does not enjoy liberty of conscience (religious liberty), liberty of movement, etc. Give it these liberties and it will cease to be discontented.
Thus, equal rights of nations in all forms (language, schools, etc.) is an essential element in the solution of the national question. Consequently, a state law based on complete democratization of the country is required, prohibiting all national privileges without exception and every kind of disability or restriction on the rights of national minorities.
This, once again, does not apply to white Amerikans, at least until they are already submitted to the will of the oppressed nation proletariat and the question becomes one of proletarianization of them and (even more importantly) their children (who will, under the destruction of the family and the rise of collective child-rearing, will be made to not bear the chauvinist outlook of their parents).
the parallels between imperial Russia and Amerika actually make a sort of “Soviet Union of Turtle Island,” a plausible outcome, except that it will exclude Euro-Amerika
This should follow from my elaboration of my position above, no?
how closely equivalent are the labor aristocracies in the non-settler oppressor nations of the imperialist world
I mean the so-called “First World”, perhaps better phrased as the “white world”. This excludes countries like Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey, etc., and potentially even places we tend to consider on the edge like South Korea.
excluding second-degree imperialist countries like China
See above. This was the wording I chose to point out my meaning of “the white imperialist countries”.
I didn't want to bring it up because it may look like I'm "boasting" about it but I feel compelled to because even as I'm throwing my criticism regarding white (and in this case, settler more specifically, but overall, white) chauvinism with that post I made, you're making these comparisons to a country (that country, even in its imperial phase) that for all intents and purposes couldn't possibly be considered white, and is very dishonest to try to compare it to white countries and settler colonies (no, the people from that country aren't white, just in case that needs to be repeated and clarified).
As I stated above, I agree that Russians are and were not white. Hence, my elaboration on the major difference between Amerika and Russia, whereby Euro-Amerikans are not and will not be revolutionary, but Great Russians were.
Everyone I interact with over the anglosphere internet just assumes I'm "from the west" and call me a "Third Worldist" whenever I point out yankee, kanadian and western europ€an "workers" aren't proletarian, but labor aristocratic. I am a Third Worlder (Mexico) born, raised and living in the Third World. I am definitely not a proletarian nor do I believe I've ever been, but what's been said by a user over here (and even implied by many historical Maoists before that person said it) is true: even a petit bourgeois from the Third World is more exploited and oppressed than a labor aristocrat from western europe and amerika/kanada/australia/new zealand, way more.
I agree.
As a side note, this comment you're making "This slogan worked to maintain and extend national divisions within the proletariat and drive the proletariats of the various nationalities closer to their respective bourgeoises" clearly does away with the concept of compradorship and is a recurring problem/chauvinism I'd run into with a lot of white/western "MLs" who didn't (and still don't) see the national bourgeois and petit bourgeois of non-white/non-western countries as progressive, and questioned why Mao didn't just expropriate them several years before the Cultural Revolution when he made those observations about the national bourgeois and the petit bourgeois from Third World nations and the compradors.
I think I see how you read that from my comment, but hopefully my elaboration should clear things up. “Their respective bourgeoisies” comes from Stalin’s On the National Question and refers to situations in which we are dealing with two nations which actually have oppressed classes capable of unity with one another. Based on the context of Stalin arguing in favor of territorial self-determination of nations (and the Bolshevik position of supporting bourgeois nationalists insofar as their goal was national self-determination and ending national oppression; i.e., national bourgeoisie) I have to assume that the “Czech bourgeoisie” which he refers to in his argument were comprador cultural-nationalists who opposed self-determination.
Having said that, from this perspective as a labor aristocrat/petit bourgeois from Mexico, I have been seeing these antagonisms that you all (not you specifically, though I do see it in your reply here too) hurl at that country. I have seen, since the war started, the way commenters in different white social media platforms and news media websites comment sections have been throwing this morbid curiousity regarding these people, seeing them as "oddballs", "weirdoes", "savages", "insensitive people", dehumanizing them, singling out the leader and his supporters from that nation as "fascist/s" and comparing him to the n@i leader from the early to mid 20th century. I've seen people talking about how there are videos in some websites about how they get slowly crushed with tanks, have some of their body parts (leg and/or arm) blown off with drone strikes and then they scream, running until they can no more and bleed out, a Donbass rebel getting their eyes redacted by a n@i, the n@i then thrusting the knife all the way into the brain through one of the sockets, some of them boiled to death in water by officials, and many more horrifying murders that could only be described as dehumanizing, all on video, or at least, some of them reported by Human Rights Watch.
I have seen this chauvinism too and I agree that it is sickening.
I can only think to myself "if the revolution started being waged in the (perhaps settler or not) colonial entity I live in, would this morbid curiousity be there for the whites to entertain themselves with?" This actually makes me empathize and sympathize with that country (a country I'm not even explicitly able to mention, as dehumanizing and annihilating as that is, to the point of gen-0-side, we're not even allowed here to post top-level domain links from that country) who are being dehumanized by the white institutions and white society overall (who obviously do not GAF about the rest of the world. The proof? The article I just linked to, written by Marxist-Leninist-Maoists). This is also not to mention that THAT country is not even first world either, not at all.
I sympathize with this. Chauvinism towards Russia (and the people of the Donbass insofar as white people even know what the Donbass is, which most do not) and rabid support for the fascists is ever present in white Amerikan society. It is disgusting. And unfortunately, I have to think the answer to your first question there, “if the revolution started being waged in the (perhaps settler or not) colonial entity I live in, would this morbid curiousity be there for the whites to entertain themselves with?“ is yes.
All of this is effectively the "otherization", the orientalization, saying things that imply that it's better to support the democrat party than supporting the leader of that nation, "fuck" that nation, using that nation as a foil, a "source" of "our problems", as this oriental despotic nation that needs to be "corrected" or even balkanized so "we can bring freedom and democracy" to "those regions". Some of these things said by "Marxist-Leninists" in OTI and western europ€.
I have seen this too. Once again, it is disgusting.
All of these are patterns I've been able to recognize from white "Marxists", and the remarks you're making here do not help pointing them out. If anything, your comments seem to obscure the dehumanization and otherization/orientalization/foiling a lot of white english-speaking "Marxist-Leninists" inflict upon that country and that people.
I apologize. Once again, the national question regarding Euro-Amerikans is not comparable to the national question regarding Great Russians in the Russian Empire, and I wasn’t really trying to say anything about modern Russia. Are you trying to say that by not explicitly attacking the tendency to dehumanize Russians, while making any comparison between Russia and Amerika, when your audience is white people, it reinforces the chauvinist concept of Russia being an imperialist country on equal terms with Amerika and therefore allows white people to attack Russia as fascist? If so I agree with that, although I do hope that the audience in this forum will not be so chauvinist. I may be wrong in my reading of your argument though so if so please correct me.
Also, there is something I find is a "special" relation that country has with the white countries and settler colonies. It is easy for amerikans and other english-speakers as well as western europeans to say the leader of that country is "fascist" and a n@i, almost like second nature.
I agree, I see this a lot and it’s disgusting.
Maybe it is a resentment from the Soviet era or your (western europe/english-speaking settler colonies) white anxiety doing the talking. And this is why I'm saying, after 11-12 years of interacting with anglo-settler and western european "leftists", that you have this uber-creepy, dehumanizing tendency to use that country, its people and of course its leadership as some kind of literary foil, perhaps because for some reason unbeknownst to me you see them as "white" and that this gives you permission to treat them as foils and dehumanize them (which is contradictory, but that's the logic of whiteness anyway, because this all clearly proves they aren't).
I used Russia as a foil because Russia is the primary subject of Lenin’s and Stalin’s works on the national question, and I think that their works on the national question are good and useful. I disagree with the notion that we should discard Lenin and Stalin because Amerika is not comparable to Russia. I used Lenin and Stalin instead of, say, Mao or Gonzalo (whose work would carry different but similarly important differences in application to settler-colonies) because I very recently re-read Lenin and Stalin’s work on the national question as part of a general study of the national question.
Perhaps this is why so many white/"western" Marxists see the 2022-present conflict as an inter-imperialist war, wish for the "revolutionary defeatism" of that country and give no further context, nor even talk about the countries and settler colonies they live in, let alone even mention about revolutionary defeatism in those and how it would look, lest they throw that "Third Worldist" slur at you.
I agree with this. As to the question of “revolutionary defeatism”, I agree that it is thrown around hypocritically as a bludgeon for Russians by white people who refuse to even consider the logical conclusion as to what that requires themselves to do. This is even worse now given the Amerikan aggression against Iran. Now “we” (Amerikans) don’t even have the shield of the comprador Ukraine to deflect responsibility for “our part” of “revolutionary defeatism” onto, “we” are actually at war and everyone knows it! And a war which nearly everyone on the “left” agrees is an aggressive imperialist war that “we” shouldn’t be in! Where is that “revolutionary defeatism” now??? Unfortunately I am not well-informed enough to say what the correct line about the war is for communists within Russia, but that is not important to the immediate question.
So something tells me such "Marxist-Leninists/Maoists" wouldn't do this if the situation was the same regarding India, China, Turkey or any other country that may or may not be imperialist, though the imperialism that country exports and has expanded is most probably an excuse for the dehumanization along with you all considering these "white" while dehumanizing them with your white institutions.
I think you are correct. There is an unusual orientalist chauvinism towards Russia. This could also be a reason for the failure of “Marxist-Leninists” and “Maoists” to promote chauvinist “revolutionary defeatism” in regards to Iran (although the fact that Amerika doesn’t have a “little guy” comprador to hide behind probably plays a big part in that too. The Zionist entity has failed miserably at playing that role in Amerikan PR).
But still (and knowing exactly this is one of the reasons why I was doing my criticism to TP/NLP):
fight national chauvinism of all sorts
It's a sure-fire way to obfuscate and muddy the waters of white chauvinism. You cannot compare any national chauvinism Balkan country peoples and nations could have with that of western europ€ans, you do not compare the settler colonialism of europ€ans on OTI with that of "Mongol Settlers", and like-wise, you do not compare the colonialism of belgians, dutch, english or french with that of the dehumanized country I'm not even able to mention.
I agree. I should have elaborated my position more in my original comment. As I see it, this is in fact the basic point I was trying to make, although I evidently didn’t do so very eloquently.
You single the country out while not commenting about China, Turkey, Iran, and many other countries. You also said China is a ""second-degree"" imperialist country, what other degrees are there? And you didn't mention that other country. Is that country a "first-degree" one? A "third-degree" one? What made you decide what "degree" of imperialism a country has other than saying that both that country and China are not first world countries that are imperialist?
Once again, I singled out Russia because I recently read Lenin and Stalin and I wanted to apply their works. I only said “second-degree” in order to distinguish it from the “First World” white countries. It was admittedly a sloppy term. All the countries you list engage in imperialist value transfer, but their positions in global production place them beneath the white First World, which is at the heart of global apartheid and lacks a proletariat. As for Ukraine, I don’t know. It certainly isn’t in the First World, although its fascists really want it to be through integration into the European economy (not that that will actually accomplish anything other than making Ukrainian migrants a cheap source of labor for Europe). I’m not sure how strong its native monopoly capital is, although given its size and lack of being one of the white First World imperialist countries, I would assume not very.
Unfortunately I am not well-informed enough to draw a complete map of “degrees” of imperialism, although you might get something close by examining routes of value transfer. That Bangladesh is qualitatively different than China in its interactions with chains of value transfer I think is self-evident, and I think that this has to do with the power of a given country’s monopoly bourgeoisie (I don’t know how to measure that though). I also think that the presence of a labor aristocracy, even a small one, is evidence of value transfer. That value transfer could probably just as well be regional, within a country, as it could be international, although a great deal of value transfer is international. Do you think that I am thinking about this wrong?
This is why I'm making all of these comments, and like I said, I'm assuming you're a "western" first worlder. But you sound so freaking much like a "western Marxist", still so eager to insert this weird discourse about wanting to compare that country with euro-settler colonies that it's evident what the question of "whiteness" is and isn't and why "westerners" call someone a "white" (or even dictate who is and isn't "white") and then turn around and dehumanize that person in the most horrifying manner.
I’m sorry that I came off that way. I hope that my elaborations made my position more clear.
The answer is: "white" is anyone white institutions decide is "white", and in this case, these people have never been "white" or maybe barely between 2001 and 2008, and never before or after that, but actually never.
I agree.
And yet the white "leftists" (including the "Marxist-Leninists") in their minds have decided that they are so they can be the foils they've always been, even since before the 1917 Communist Revolution, these "other" that need to be scorned because of whatever fascist excuse the whites can come up with ("they're fascists", "they're imperialist", etc., etc., etc.) to do so.
I agree.
Once again, thank you for your critique and I hope that this has cleared things up. Please let me know if you still think that my position is chauvinist.
Also, I started writing this comment earlier today and haven’t read the rest of the thread, so I’m sorry if I did not address anything that you brought up later. I will keep up with the thread when I get the opportunity though.
Source: r/u/Equivalent_Bank4157 · by /u/Equivalent_Bank4157